


One

by yuletide_archivist



Category: The Matrix (Movies)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-22
Updated: 2004-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 08:02:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1640327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trinity reflects on Neo and the influence of his life on her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Obmib

 

 

I remember when I was still plugged in, my mother talking about how someday I would find 'the one for me'. That boy who would make all the others pale in comparison. The one who would make me weak-kneed and blithering with love and sweep away all doubts and fears with just a smile.

Her choice of words still makes me laugh sometimes.

But although she wasn't really right about the blithering and weak-knee'd part, his smile was bang on. The way he looks at me when I need him to erases the rest of the world in a way nothing else could. In one way or another my whole life has become trapped in his gravity, pulled down in little pieces, like rain from the sky.

The first drop in the bucket was that moment in the club, when we first met face to face. I leaned so close to speak and almost choked to hear myself remind him that he was alone. I didn't want him to be, and more than that I wanted to be the one who filled the void.

Watching him before that had held an appropriately high fantasy factor. His voice on the phone lines, his words on a screen, were like those first flirtatious brushes with the outside; back when it seemed impossible that everything I felt was wrong in the world might someday stand before me,   
miraculously right and real. But speaking to him face to face under the thunder of the music that night stirred something I hadn't dared to touch. The empty sensation in my gut that something was still wrong - the one that had haunted me since my first real steps.

I'd never been able to put my finger on what was 'wrong' with the outside. Zion, the Neb, Morpheus and his crew ... It was all as real as I could ask for it to be, full of human life and logic. Everything I'd learned made sense and the obvious fun that came with being able to bend the laws of physics in the Matrix made up for the initial creepy feeling that crawled up everyone's spine the first time they made a successful jump.

My first visit to the Oracle seemed like the most likely prospect for explaining my uneasy feeling about my new world. Like most of us, I was surprised by her, but having not smelled cookies in nigh on fourteen months I wasn't apt to complain as I was ushered to sit at the table. She told me that I was missing what every teenage girl with a heart in her chest would have been missing. She also happened to tell me just where I would find it...

Morpheus had always muttered endlessly about 'The One', but when we began to track Neo it was like watching a hunting dog go from a loping walk to pointing out prey. He was focused to the point of utter obsession and with the Oracle's words ringing in my head, I was in it up to my elbows along with him.

Morpheus's passion for his mission had always been able to rile a devotion of effort from his crew, but this was different. The two of us up late nights pouring over files, skimming data, planning and organizing. Even Mouse, who could border on obsessive-compulsive on a good day, was giving us strange looks.

When it finally all panned out, my world turned upside down. Seeing him in atrophied flesh and trembling blood on his first day outside is the image of him I can't forget. The `before' in my before and after picture of Neo.

Before he knew what had happened to his world, before he hit the pavement on his first jump, before I saw him move the way I couldn't and dodge what should have killed him. Before I watched him bleed in front of me, body turning on itself in desperation to replicate physically what his mind believed.

Before I told him what she told me as I had sat with a cookie in my mouth in a strange kitchen trying to know myself.

And I know exactly when it hit me that I had to tell him. When I was hearing Cypher's voice on the phone, standing in the warehouse, staring around at three terrified people all at his filthy fingertips. Switch crumpling to the floor, then Apoc. The horrible hiss of that voice imploring me to look into `those big pretty eyes' and seal his fate. He stared back at me like a terrified child, knowing something was wrong but as if not understanding quite what.

Months later he explained his confusion. Said that I'd looked so scared then that he was afraid that I was being told I was next - that it was me Cypher was going to rip the life from and that he'd have to watch me fall. He shuddered when he said it, buried his face in my shoulder. He squeezed me in his arms as if he needed me to breathe and told me he loved me and all I could do was return the favour.

I expected to be scared the second time, when it was my finger on the button balancing our lives with his. The calm that came over me is surreal in my memory and overwhelmed by a feeling of disbelief.

I remember hearing the monitors go flat, seeing that faint final convulsion of his chest and knowing someplace in the back of my head that he'd just died. I couldn't even feel the fingers still clenched around the EMP. My mind was screaming 'He's dead!' and the rest of me spoke.

I'd never told him ... I had to tell him ... .

"You can't be dead, do you hear me? Because I love you..."

I don't remember being conscious of the sentinels in the ship until I saw them lying in a wreckage around us, after he'd opened his eyes again and gave me that dazed look of 'did I just do that?' That first un-dreaming kiss, feeling his warm skin under my hands, being able to hear the heartbeat that had so terrifyingly stopped moments ago...

From that moment there was no curiosity, no feeling of void or doubt. Just him, securely settled where there had been nothing before. Worst and best moments of my life and everything in between packed into one man with a smile that could erase it all.

The One. And he's mine.

 


End file.
